Dr Who

Finally caught up with last Saturday’s Dr Who this evening.  Erm.  P enjoyed it and has watched it three times.  I thought it was OK.  Hasn’t Dr Who already met Shakespeare?  Or has he just referred to it?

The use of the Globe was spectacular.

The witches were a bit silly.

The ending was odd.

But the thing that was exercising my mind was  – if the Doctor showed up and offered to take you anywhere in space or time for just one trip – would you prefer to go forward in time or back?  Back to any part of human history you’d wondered about and wanted to see for yourself?  Or forward to see how some current controversy pans out?

That’s assuming you got to choose of course – Martha didn’t!

Cut and paste

Cut and paste is an excellent way of making sure one simple mistake ends up on 10,000 leaflets, which end up having to be recycled and reprinted.

It’s going to be a long night.

Last year, for the bank holiday weekend, we went camping in Sandringham.  This year, I’m spending it on the office, slaving over a hot Riso.

I think I know which I prefer.

Wii attention to detail

Ace campaigner Ed Maxfield very kindly came to Nottingham yesterday to help out with delivering leaflets and canvassing in some of our key ward campaigns.

As a treat, he got to christen our guest facilities (which are nearing completion not because I have finally sorted out my junk mountain, but rather because much of the junk mountain has been relocated to the attic) and have a go on the Wii.

Although Wario left him cold, he was rather taken with some of the Wii Sports games, and really took to Wii Tennis. After a few rounds we found we were actually quite well matched, and some close games ensued.

Whilst we were playing this, I noticed a fab detail – whenever a point is won, the game replays the foul or the out, etc from a different camera angle.  The camera tracks the tennis ball across the court, and as it does, the four players there variously come into and go out of focus, depending on how far they are from the ball’s position on the court.

That’s quite some attention to detail.  A nice touch of verisimilitude.  I wonder how many people will have even spotted it?

Location messaging

OK, so using my sat nav program to send location texts to Twitter didn’t work.

You can set the sat nav into “beacon” mode to send a message at an interval you specify. I had it running this afternoon whilst scouring the Derbyshire countryside for stationery.

According to my SMS log, the messages it sends look like this:

!NLOC1.1:o|W1.39792|N53.20134|329|556466871|

It’s fairly easy to pick out the bits – it includes Northings and Eastings in decimal longitude and latitude. The 329 is probably a bearing. If you pop W1.39792 N53.20134 into Google Maps, it helpfully converts it to +53° 12′ 4.82″, -1° 23′ 52.51″ and puts a green marker down in Grassmere, where I was at Frank Berry the Stationer.

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t like the format, and every time sat nav fired off a missive like that, Twitter responded direct to my phone

Sorry, we didn't understand your message. Try again?

Probably just as well, because the machine format text message wouldn’t have made a whole lot of sense to either of the people who seem to be following me on Twitter. They’d be in sharp contrast to the ones from MikeTD, which are always entertaining when they turn up on my phone.  Slightly freaky that the technology allows you stalk someone you know only slightly!

RSSFWD

Gosh. This might be useful. www.rssfwd.com

You put RSS links into it, and it e-mails them to you.

I can see applications for that. It would have been really useful before I figured out how to use RSS in Thunderbirrd.

And it might be more useful still for getting less technical people to follow a feed.

Twitter

OK, I heard about twitter yonks and yonks ago – Alan started using it, then so too did Mike.

Then Mike published a list of texts he’d sent to Twitter last night whilst waiting for a date, and that pushed me back into investigating it this morning when I should have been getting ready to go out. (It’s so often been the source of me being horribly late… “Oh, I’ll just check my e-mail. And Cix. And usenet. And the blogs I follow, and the websites I click on every day. Ooh, that looks interesting…”)

So, Twitter is a quick thing, you tell it a one line post and it puts it on its own website, and makes it available for you to put on other websites. You can update it on the internet and by sending it a text message and through an IM client, although only a set of services I don’t use, like AIM.

So, it’s a bit like a mini-blog. Quick to update, but not so much space for wittering. A bit like the “status” bit of Facebook, but possible to incorporate it in other sites in a very Web 2.0 way.

Two further things occurred since I set it up this afternoon. What if I gave my Sat Nav program the Twitter SMS number? Navicore has a “beacon” function that texts your lat and long periodically to an SMS number of your choosing. I haven’t yet found a use for that, but when I was off round France for a long time, it would have been cool to send a regular series of co-ordinates to somewhere central to record them, and then plot them on a map on something like Google Earth.

Then I wondered about political uses for Twitter. It would be interesting to have people in the media eye to use it. “Ming Campbell is going into PMQs” for example. Or even “I’m in Full Council. This is taking ages!”

Both of those uses open up the chance for people whose interests are not terribly well aligned with yours to use your activity against you. Or stalk you. Is that a risk worth taking?

Poisson d’Avril

OK, so I twigged that Blair wasn’t really going to tread the boards, and that there weren’t really astronauts playing Quidditch.  Neither Iain Dale nor Lord Owen are really going to stand for Mayor of London.

But Troubled Diva reading out extracts from his blog book on Woman’s Hour?  Yup, swallowed that one hook line and sinker.

Even the increasingly silly parts of it.  No trouble believing that R4 wonk thinks TD is a woman.  No trouble believing he’d go with it.  No trouble thinking he’d make a recording trying to sound less butch.

Dear me.  I never was good at anagrams.

The numbers game

Canvassing is a numbers game.  Whilst standing at unanswered doors yesterday evening, I was multiplying fractions.

About one in ten people are in, or answer the door when knocked.

Only half of the people of that inner city ward register to vote.

Only one in five actually votes in local elections.

Of those that vote in that area, half voted Lib Dem at the last election.

That’s 1/10 * 1/2 * 1/5 * 1/2  = 1/200 chance that any given door I knock on will have someone behind it who will tell me they will vote Lib Dem.

I have to knock on 200 doors to find someone who will vote for us.  And if I do, that means we are winning.

So why do we it? Because one in ten of those one in two hundred people might join the Lib Dems if asked.  And one in ten of those might help out and deliver leaflets.  And who knows, one in ten of those might want to become a Lib Dem councillor.

That gets us to 1/200,000.

There are only 280,000 people in Nottingham.  We’re clearly screwed.  Or I can’t do maths.

Blair to tread boards

Tony Blair’s post-political career is to be theatre, the Observer reports today.

He’ll be appearing in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as the Reverend John Hale.

Which is the character I played when we did The Crucible at school in 1992.

I spent most of the time of my German exchange (when not playing Civ on my exchange mate’s computer.) I can remember the play, and some of the other people who were in it.

I can remember one strange rehearsal of one of the acts, in which Hale is supposed to ask a married couple to recite the ten commandments and the husband forgets Thou shalt not commit adultery. In the rehearsal, I forgot my lines, and missed out the question. Which made the act go a little quicker than planned and skipped rather a lot of important material.

I can’t now remember any of my lines – or indeed any of the lines from the other shows I’ve been in (there’s a list here). But I can remember the name of my German exchange partner. Googling his name, it looks like he’s just published his PhD. I can’t remember his return visit at all, but there are several things from my stay in Nuremberg that stay with me. In my first hour in Germany, after my first plane trip, with my ears hurting like hell and a headache, it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to flush the toilet and how to turn the tap on to wash my hands. It was one of those lift and turn mixer taps. I can’t remember why the loo puzzled me, but I can remember it had one of those strange platforms.

The other strong memory is of a dinner we had one night where they gave me grated cheese and raw meat and pickles, and we took it in turns to load a mini-saucepan and then put it under a mini electric grill on the table to cook/melt.

I haven’t been in Germany for years now, and my language skills are failing fast. Must go back! But in my mental, unbooked, holiday plans for this year, it looks like Geneva and Brussels are on the list, and possibly Normandy again. Geneva to visit friends variously in the Alps and Geneva itself; Brussels to show P the Atomium and the European Parliament, and the chocolate, and the Tintin murals and and and…, and as an excuse to use the Eurostar once the St Pancras terminal opens this autumn.